Alias Grace By Margaret Atwood Nan A. Talese/Doubleday Cold Mountain By Charles Frazier Atlantic Monthly Press Because They Wanted To By Mary Gaitskill Simon & Schuster Mason & Dixon By Thomas Pynchon Henry Holt The Reader By Bernhard Schlink Pantheon - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - How Proust Can Change Your Life By Alain de Botton Pantheon The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down By Anne Fadiman Farrar Straus & Giroux Into Thin Air By Jon Krakauer Villard Echoes of a Native Land By Serge Schmemann Knopf Close to the Machine By Ellen Ullman City Lights Books - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Reader's choice awards Your best books of 1997 - - - - - - - - - - - Sneak Peeks Salon's daily book review Win a free Salon mousepad. Sign up for our newsletter. Join the Books discussion in Table Talk. - - - - - - - - - - - SALON home page

The Salon Book Awards PAGE 3 OF 3 | N O N F I C T I O N | - - - - - - - - - - - - HOW PROUST CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE By Alain de Botton Pantheon Just because Alain de Botton's tribute to the author of "In Search of Lost Time" reads like a melt-in-your-mouth amusement and bears a mock self-help title, don't make the mistake of dismissing it as something slight. In fact, de Botton tackles a remarkable array of human follies -- our preference for yearning over satisfaction, our tendency to fetishize great artists rather than truly engage with them, the way we let envy and pettiness poison our relationships and, most of all, our mulish refusal to appreciate the world's many opportunities for delight -- it's just that he does it with such gentle élan that you feel entertained rather than educated. This off-beat experiment in literary appreciation is the most entirely and consummately charming book of the year. That de Botton has chosen a gloomy hypochondriac genius as a role model is only the sweet kernel of his joke. "How Proust Can Change Your Life": EXCERPT__|__ORDER A COPY__|__SNEAK PEEKS REVIEW - - - - - - - - - - - - THE SPIRIT CATCHES YOU AND YOU FALL DOWN: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures By Anne Fadiman Farrar, Straus & Giroux Anne Fadiman's remarkable book takes its title from a disease suffered by a young Hmong girl named Lia Lee. (The Hmong are a Laotian hill tribe, many of whose members fled to America -- and particularly to California -- after the Indochina wars.) Lia's American doctors diagnose her illness as epilepsy, brought on by a short-circuit in her cerebral neurons. Lia's parents call it quag dab peg -- the spirit catches you and you fall down -- which to them means, as Fadiman writes, "her soul had fled her body and become lost." Fadiman's book, eight years in the making, is the chronicle of a profound cultural clash over the best way to care for Lia. Part of Fadiman's achievement here is combining hard-headed analysis with extraordinary empathy; she enables us to fully view Lia's plight from two very different perspectives. What's more, the book is written on an intimate, personal scale. "I passed many hours in waiting rooms gnawing on the question, What is a good doctor?" Fadiman writes. "During the same period, my two children were born, and I found myself often asking a second question that is also germane to the Lees' story: What is a good parent?" Her book provides stunning insight into each. "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down": EXCERPT__|__ORDER A COPY - - - - - - - - - - - - INTO THIN AIR: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster By Jon Krakauer Villard "One foot in China, the other in Nepal, I cleared the ice from my oxygen mask, hunched a shoulder against the wind, and stared absently down at the vastness of Tibet." So begins Jon Krakauer's breathtaking narrative about a 1996 climbing disaster on Mount Everest, in which 11 people, including two of the finest climbers in the world, froze to death during a freak storm. Krakauer begins his tale on top of the world; he was among the relative few who would make it down alive. It's among the highest praise you can bestow on "Into Thin Air" to say that it's a much better book than it had to be. Krakauer has a great tale to tell, but in his hands the book turns into something more than a mere adventure story. "Everest has always been a magnet for kooks, publicity seekers, hopeless romantics and others with a shaky hold on reality," he writes, and he introduces us to more than a few of each. In the end, "Into Thin Air" becomes a genuine morality tale in which the author chastises himself (among others) for not having helped save more lives. "The stain this has left on my psyche is not the sort of thing that washes off after a few months of grief and guilt-ridden self-reproach," he writes. His is a book that doesn't wash off, either. "Into Thin Air": EXCERPT__|__ORDER A COPY__|__SNEAK PEEKS REVIEW - - - - - - - - - - - - ECHOES OF A NATIVE LAND Serge Schmemann Knopf Fire up the samovar, take the phone off the hook and bring out the fluffy quilt because Serge Schmemann turns his history of the country estate where his maternal ancestors once presided into a tale as bewitching as one of Tolstoy's. This is deep history, rooted in the author's personal connection to the land and its people, and exhaustively researched, but "Echoes" is also magical; even if you've never felt the tug of Mother Russia's romance before, you're likely to succumb to it this time. As a New York Times reporter covering the Soviet Union and its fall, Schmemann sought out Koltsovo, the place his grandfather always remembered as "that lost worldly paradise for which we all yearn ... where the soul first opened to receive God's universe and its marvels," and he eventually bought a farmhouse there, establishing warm friendships with the town's current inhabitants. His relatives from the csarist era all seem to have produced memoirs, and even more remarkably, they all write like angels. It runs in the family. "Echoes of a Native Land": EXCERPT__|__ORDER A COPY - - - - - - - - - - - - CLOSE TO THE MACHINE: Technophila and Its Discontents By Ellen Ullman City Lights Ellen Ullman's wry and frequently melancholy memoir "Close to the Machine" may be the best -- it's certainly the most human -- book to have emerged thus far from the culture of Silicon Valley. Ullman is that rarity, a computer programmer with a poet's feeling for language. She's written a book that's flooded with the joy that programmers (she calls them "weird logic dreamers") often experience when they give themselves over to "the sheer fun of the technical, to the nearly sexual pleasure of the clicking thought-stream." Yet she's also acutely aware of the real difficulties that arise when "human needs must cross the line into code." Ullman's book is not for techies-only; it's more about the human mind (and about politics, relationships and good bottles of wine) than it is about software. Even better, Ullman is never less than frank: "It has occurred to me," she writes, "that if people really knew how software got written, I'm not sure if they'd give their money to a bank or get on an airplane ever again." "Close to the Machine": EXCERPT__|__ORDER A COPY SALON | Jan. 19, 1998 (The Salon Book Awards are chosen from trade titles published in the United States and in English.) - - - - - - - - - - - - Introduction | Fiction Awards - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -